Wordplay

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Dmitri Borgmann in 1965 coined the term "logology" (meaning systematic recreational linguistics) and divided the field into three broad classes: letter play, sound play, and meaning play. During the past 40 years logology (especially letter play) has been extensively developed.

The topical classification of wordplay in this article can only hint at its complexity.

Properties of words

Words as used supply units of meaning for communication through vocalization, aboriginally, then much later for communication through writing.

In making that assertion in writing, this communicator set out combinations of letters separated by spaces, mostly different combinations, arranged in a particular order making up a 'sentence', the assertion.

Those letter-combinations constitute 'words', each different combination with its own meaning. Some 'words' have more than one meaning, often taken from the context of the message communicated by the sentence.

In vocally communicating, each different 'word' also has its own sound-form, with variations around the most common.

In the English language, used here, only twenty six letter-types combined in various groups of various sizes enable generation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, unique 'words', or 'word-types.'

Although each 'word' has the message of its meaning, endless combinations of those million-or-so word-types enable endless messages of endless degrees of complexity of informational content.

Styles of speech-sounds make up dialects, and writing styles abound.

We use words to communicate with others and with ourselves, the latter in the form of thinking or, surrogately, in the form of writing.

Words supply the mind with symbols that enable and empower thinking analytically ("the wind knocked it over") and synthetically ("let's harness the wind's energy for doing work for us").

Words permit mention of themselves, as when we talk about the word 'word' or define 'define'.

People use words to write books about words (linguists, lexicographers, poets, logologists).

Literary technique

Annotated bibliography

A good survey of wordplay can be found in Dave Morice, The Dictionary of Wordplay (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2001).

A collection of literary wordplay can be found in C.C. Bombaugh’s Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest Fields of Literature (1874, reprinted in 1961 by Dover Publications as Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature). More recent examples of the genre are Willard Espy’s An Almanac of Words at Play (Clarkson Potter, 1975) and Another Almanac of Words at Play (Clarkson Potter, 1980); the best examples were reprinted in The Best of an Almanac of Words at Play (Merriam-Webster, 1999). Palindromes seem to hold a particular fascination for lovers of wordplay, and there are many collections; a recent attempt to cover the topic in depth is I Love Me, Vol I: S. Wordrow's Palindrome Encyclopedia, (Algonquin, 1996) ISBN 1565121090.

A classic is Dmitri Borgmann’s Language on Vacation (Scribner’s, 1965); in this book, he showed how wordplay can be an intellectual pursuit in its own right, codified as an organized corpus of knowledge. During the past 40 years logology (especially letter play) has been extensively developed in the quarterly journal Word Ways as well as a number of books in various languages: A. Ross Eckler, Jr.’s Making the Alphabet Dance (St. Martin’s, 1996), Hugo Brandt Corstius’s (Battus’s) Opperlans! (Querido, 2002) in Dutch, and Màrius Serra’s Verbalia (Atalaya, 2000) in Catalan.

External links

A taxonomy of wordplay together with record-holding words in each category is